Recent reviews by Rapscallion

TCG economics do not work the same when you don't have actual cards that you can stash and/or resell. in the digital world it's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ lootboxes. in other words this is one of countless terminally monetized games.

I can only recommend this if you intend to play casually. can't give it a thumbs down because it's actually pretty well put together.

this game won me over when an old lady machine gunned a corrupt cop to death

it's a tough job but somebody's gotta do it

game is playable and stable but the content is maybe 75% finished. very much as fun as the first one. insane production value and quality VA work is there too.

unpolished turd

game looks great, sounds great, and is very well polished.

it's not a very good roguelite. it simply doesn't nail the difficulty and power curve at all. "brutal" difficulty, the second highest setting, is actually very easy. there's no reason you should lose in any world size unless you get absurdly unlucky. the enemy waves barely get harder over time. your own defenses are pretty weak and clunky and barely get any better with upgrades, and are about as underwhelming as the enemy waves, which also never spike or synergize. it gets boring rapidly.

I can't really vote this game down. it's a well crafted product, it's cheap, the devs obviously care, and it could be made great with a medium-scope redesign. however in its current state, it's pretty mediocre.

if you're going to take ♥♥♥♥ out at least leave the old game up

this game really falls apart around the mid to late game. the gist of the X series is that you start out doing menial, low impact tasks in a huge living world, then gradually move on towards higher level goals as you start automating more and more stuff, and eventually end up manipulating the world to create ideal conditions for your underlings to generate tons upon tons of profitssss.

the problem is that in order for this to work, you need to be able to delegate those tasks, and the AI pilots could not be trusted to wipe their own asses even if you duct taped toilet paper to their hands and placed a scorpion down their cracks. they will take your expensive L and XL vessels and commit suicide while accomplishing nothing, three times out of four.

the menus are also especially frustrating to navigate. tasks that ought to be simple and need to be done frequently, like swapping pilots between ships, is a mess of navigation from tab to tab and submodal to submodal, and you have to memorize ship callsigns before you do it because there is no way to get pilots and ships to be shown together.

and then there are the countless bugs. repair lasers just straight up not working despite being in the proper weapon group, two meters away from the satellite with the beam physically *clipping through*. alt tab silently unpausing the game. your ship being slingshotted 8000km away from the sector core immediately after you reload a save. it goes on and on.

there is nothing like the X series of space simulators and Egosoft can therefore get away with a LOT of jank. X3 was a mess and we loved the hell out of it nonetheless. X4 is simply far too broken in its current state.

great art direction, fun (for a time) and overall very charming on the surface.

the main gameplay loop however is simplistic and gets tedious really fast. the spoopy atmosphere, which starts out great, completely dissipates once you realize that you're almost never in any real danger, except for one or two scripted hazards. without getting into spoilers, once you get to the bottom of the game's central mystery, it's all a little bit disappointing.

I can't recommend this game at full price. get it on sale for 50% or less

in a hundred years they will still be talking about this game